Nine days 'til Panther! Nine days 'til Panther! Not that we're getting excited or anything. Sure, we're looking forward to hours of productivity irretrievably lost to Exposé as we repeatedly press the F11 key and watch all of our windows skitter off the screen like so many startled cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on, but mostly we're just anticipating a whole heaping helping of Schadenfreude and gloating when we're all gleefully running Panther and the Windoids are still waiting for Longhorn. And waiting. And waiting...

Yup, while Longhorn was formerly slated for a 2005 release, Microsoft Watch reports that company officials have finally admitted that it's now expected to slip into 2006. Well, okay, they didn't actually say that as such; instead they casually mentioned that Longhorn is "three years away from debut" and hoped that people who use Windows on a regular basis would have been too beaten into submission by the experience to bother doing the math. By our count, though, late 2003 plus three years equals late 2006-- and in Microsoftian release date coordinates, that might even slide into early 2007. Of course, that last bit's just conjecture, but the late-2006 release date comes from Microsoft itself.

If you need more to go on than the say-so of a handful of nameless Microsoft execs with PowerPoint presentations, you're in luck: faithful viewer Mikey points out that, according to The Register, Longhorn's lateness has been confirmed by no less an authority than Bill "Stumpy" Gates himself. Sort of. Reportedly he told journalists that "Longhorn could be 2005 or 2006." Which means, of course, 2006-- or, if you're a realist and you remember that Windows NT 5 was so late they renamed it "Windows 2000," 2007.

Bill went on to say that Longhorn "is going to be driven by technology, not by a release date. Which probably means that it is going to be late." So there you have it, folks: straight from the filthy rich horse's mouth. (Then again, the man also told the same reporters that Microsoft "invented personal computing," so there's every chance the lil' fella was stoned out of his gourd at the time-- this was in The Hague, after all, just thirtyish miles from Amsterdam.) Given the history of major Mac OS X upgrades so far, by the time Longhorn finally lopes into view over two whole years from now, we'll probably have replaced Panther with Tiger, have replaced Tiger with Lynx, and already be looking at previews for a 2006 release of Mac OS X British Tick.

Heck, if Microsoft officials are serious about Longhorn being "three years away from debut," we might even be using British Tick by then. Meanwhile, we look forward to getting our "before the end of this year" copies of Panther more than two months before the end of this year. With Panther out the door and Longhorn delayed until at least 2006, Apple's developers now have a good chunk of time to put Mac OS X so far back out in front of Windows that the disparity will the clearest it's been since System 7 vs. Windows 3.1. Do we sense a vicious beatdown in the making?